News

“I hate to break it to you, Tomoka-san, but according to this, your video card is fucked!”

Sometimes things don’t go the way you had imagined it in your head. Rewind to the holiday season, and I’m plugging away at one website (which will remain unnamed) while a bunch of video encodes are queued up for the other, not to mention lots of ideas stirring for the Top Openings of 2013, and that’s where it all fell apart. There is never a good time for computer hardware failure, and it’s usually when you least expect it. Naturally, your reaction is to freak out first and think later, so I did what any sensible, well-adjusted person would do. I rage quit, launched the Steam app on my Android phone, and purchased more games. Because who needs a working GPU for those, right?

Now I know what you’re thinking. “But Red, why would it take three months to get that sorted out?!” Well, when you add a hard drive crash on top of it, shit really starts to hit the fan. Apparently I have really bad luck with those, and you’d think I’d have learned by now that you should never put all of your eggs into one basket. Thus, it’s taken me a while to regather all of the necessary tools that I depend on to keep this blog running. In any case, Eroyume is officially back in operation. Granted, not in top form, but expect stuff to start happening soon.

You’re given numerous ways to stay socially connected with Red @ Eroyume, so why not add another avenue for your stalking pleasure? Just kidding. I’ve debated over whether or not to share this, but I could use some like-minded gamers on my friends list. When I’m not playing VNs, this is where I go to unwind. If you have a Steam account, send me a request sometime. I don’t bite. ^_^

While we’re on the subject, Steam is a great digital distribution service, but Valve’s unwillingness to approve visual novels for sale is disheartening. I can only think of one at the moment (Analogue: A Hate Story), which by the way, I never bought but probably should just to show my support for the genre. Ever since JAST acquired licensing for the Steins;Gate VN last month, I have wondered if there will be any push to get this title on Steam’s storefront. MangaGamer has tried to go through Greenlight, but I don’t think they have the right IP for it. Eroge is of course out of the question because of the anti-porn policy. This medium will probably need its own platform to address a different segment of the market.

I can’t give an exact date, but it’s coming. I won’t be linking to it on this website either, but I will make an announcement over Twitter when it’s available for download. You’ll then need to search the NyaaTorrents tracker for keyword “Eroyume”. This pack will be pretty big. Over 1,000 full songs more than likely.

Just a reminder for those who read the news several months ago and for anyone who is just joining us, our MediaFire account was suspended in January, and Eroyume was left with a lot of dead links to files that are no longer available. I am working on replacing these with links to the Mega file host, but since there are about 800 videos, it is a slow process.

Until everything has been fixed, I will grant all visitors of this blog access to Eroyume’s download folder which contains every video I’ve ever encoded. To get started, click the Mega image below. Once loaded, you can double-click to download a file, or you can hold down the ctrl key to select multiple files in the directory and then right-click to download.

MediaFire recently went through lots of changes, and coincidentally, a bunch of accounts went with it. I’m assuming there was some sort of an amendment to their terms of service, maybe a three strikes policy. Anyway, some of Eroyume’s files have been under attack by Funimation in the past, and that is likely what led to the suspension. This, of course, is unintentional. They have bots that automatically sniff out specific titles, and they often mistake these as being videos from anime they’ve licensed for distribution in the United States. They don’t hold the publishing rights to any visual novels, and to my knowledge, no visual novel publisher has ever filed any formal complaints. And why would they? They provide the vast majority of these for free on the internet, and I just bring them down to size. Now, I could counter some of these DMCA requests, but it could only be on their behalf. Rather than go through that kind of trouble, I will just switch to a more secure file host, and that brings us to…

MEGA. This is Kim Dotcom’s new business venture set to succeed MegaUpload. Download speeds are reasonably fast. It lacks features as it’s still in beta testing, but one nice thing it has that MediaFire does not is support for 32 languages, including Japanese. I’ve already uploaded all of Eroyume’s files to the service, but it is going to take me some time to replace all of the links at the website.

As for the lack of updates, and I know some of you were wondering, January has always been a notoriously slow month for VNs. There just haven’t been any new videos to add, and I haven’t had the time to upload any older ones with my job being so demanding. Things will be back into full swing very soon. Thanks for your patience. 🙂

2012 has been a very busy year. We saw the relaunch of Eroyume in January after a 2-year long hiatus. Fuwanovel had its grand opening. VNTLS made great strides in informing the community on the progress of translated VNs. The industry, despite what some veterans of the hobby might say, is quite bustling. Among the games released this year, there were more than 165 opening videos made available for viewing (a new record?). Today I will attempt to narrow this down to a Top 10. The two criteria I look for in a contender is a quality song and good CG/animation. If they use only CG images and portraits, it’s important they do so with some originality. I try not to take overall game quality into consideration, although I may comment on it at times. So without further ado, here are my picks for this year’s best OPs. Continue Reading

TinFoil, administrator of the VNTL Status Tracker, along with Moogy, owner of TLWiki and translator of several visual novels, recorded the site’s first audio podcast during a livestream on Monday. This coincides with TinFoil’s efforts to expand the website by including a News/Blog section that is “like Encubed, but for long writeups and developer posts.”

Initially, I went into the podcast expecting to be trolled, but instead I actually found it quite informative. The two are working closely with JAST USA to bring over official releases in English, so you get a lot of insight as to how things are progressing on that front. Lots of fan translations were also discussed, with some nice endorsements for the Grisaia no Kajitsu and Aiyoku no Eustia projects (both of which are favorites of mine). They did have some unflattering things to say about Fuwanovel, but that’s not too surprising. You don’t hear Microsoft praising Google, either.

As I understand it, more recordings are being planned after the pilot episode, with the possibility of other guest translators appearing on the show. Whether this will be done weekly or monthly isn’t revealed. If you have any interest in English-translated visual novels, this 1 hour and 30 minutes is time well spent.

Note: The audio player above links directly to the mp3 at the VNTLS page. Hopefully they don’t mind it being streamed here. I thought it would make things easier.

As tweeted and blogged by Aaeru earlier today, a sneak preview of the English translated visual novel repository, Fuwanovel.org, is now available for viewing. Eroyume and lots of other websites play a very specific role in bringing visual novels to the English-speaking community, and all of them are vital in their own way but none are quite as cohesive, intuitive and visually appealing as this. I believe it’ll serve as a great entry point into the fandom and make English patches and games more accessible to more people. This is something that is needed for the spreading of the medium in the west, and that is why I support it. You can help by testing out the pages and sending feedback to aaeru@fastmail.fm.

Of course, I will continue to do my part by providing videos. You’ll notice that I’ve placed a high emphasis on titles with translations for the past two weeks, and there are far more than I had anticipated. The translation scene exploded after I went MIA in 2009, and I completely lost track of it, but I’m slowly getting up to speed. TinFoil at VNTL is currently listing 270 titles (Kurukuru Fanatic was the latest addition this week), and there are many more he hasn’t added yet. I’m not sure of the exact number, but I am looking into it. I’ve encoded and uploaded OP videos for 89 of them, so I still have a ways to go.

There has never been a better time to get into the fandom. There are more visual novels being licensed out to big publishers and receiving official English releases than ever before (just recently, JAST announced Trample on Schatten at Anime Expo). There are also more fan translators working tirelessly to make these games playable in English than ever before. Despite all of the cease and desist letters and DMCA takedown notices, things are more active in the community now than they were two years ago. It hasn’t quite reached the level of maturation we’ve seen from anime fansubs, but it’s made great strides, so a lack of knowledge in the Japanese language is no longer a good excuse. There are plenty of options available to you.

I want to make others more aware of this at Eroyume. To start with, I’m adding the VNTLS logo in the bottom right of a post for any title that’s fully playable in English or has an English translation patch in the works. When clicked, it’ll take you to the status page. Here’s an example. On the Master List (which is still currently empty, btw, but I’m working on it), you’ll be able to sort by titles that are translated.

As far as other recent changes made, well… there are many. Explore the home page and see what you find. -_^

In an effort to have more consistency across all posts on this site, I will be going back and redoing any page that was added on or before December 2009. I would like them to conform to the current template that is being used, and that means links to bittorrent, a streaming audio player, and new file names with the [Eroyume] tag. I’ve also given careful consideration into redoing the older video encodes to 10-bit. However, this presents a few problems. The first is that it would take quite a while to tweak and filter 130+ videos. I spent many hours trying to get them to perfect, almost-transparent quality. Secondly, I lost the original, raw files in a hard drive crash, and some of them would be difficult to obtain again. In the end, I chose to leave them as is, since I felt it would be too much effort for what amounts to very little gains. The only advantage I can think of would be smaller file sizes and possibly less color banding. You’ll know it’s an old encode when you spot the [H264] tag, by the way.

This will require a bit of work, but rest assured, it won’t cut into my upload time for new releases, and I will continue to add at least one new video every day from here on out. This is similar to say the Twelve Days of Christmas deal that some Japanese music artists like to do. Except with me, it’ll be all-year long. ^_^

Some other things I’m working on:

– I’ve added a bunch of new links to the sidebar. A couple of new blogs have popped up in the past year or two. I’m especially pleased with Amaenbou Dane~ and The Monologues of a Bored Man. At the same time, some of the veteran blogs seem to have died down quite a bit or aren’t being updated at all. Kind of sad to see, but it’d be hypocritical of me to judge, ya know?

– Da Master List! Everyone will bow to it, and it will be holy. No, but seriously, it’s on the way. The site has over 200 uploads now. It’s becoming a database. We need ways to sort through it. lol

– The “About Eroyume” page. “Who is your daddy, and what does he do?”

– “The Music” page. This needs an update badly. I’ll post the date and changes made at the top of that page, so you’ll know when it’s been done.